1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a process for automatic detection of the assessable areas in an image of a mechanical component, and is applicable in particular to the X-ray inspection of mechanical components.
2. Summary of the Prior Art
The X-ray inspection of a component is generally carried out from several views making it possible to look at different regions of the component. The images obtained for the various views often exhibit several areas. Certain areas are referred to as non-assessable when they are saturated by very bright or very dark gray levels, or when the contrast therein is not sufficient to allow the detection of defects, or when they do not represent the component; the remaining areas are referred to as assessable and are used to search for any possible defects.
The known methods for determining the assessable areas in an image of a mechanical component generally involve marking the different areas of the image and in then determining the exact outline of the areas by using the so-called watershed line method, WSL for short. The problem with these methods is that they are not fully automatic and require an operator to perform the marking of the areas of the image. The determination of the markers is a tricky operation and must be carried out by an operator skilled in image analysis. The manual methods are particularly lengthy and irksome in the frequent cases in which they are applied to the inspection of mass-produced mechanical components and in which the same processing is to be applied to a series of images depicting the same scene together with objects which may be situated at different locations and/or have variable shapes. Furthermore, the absence of any systematic method for performing the marking of the areas may lead to erroneous interpretations of the images and call into question the reliability of the inspection of the components.